NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Second Wave of Stupidity By Christopher Roach

Posted By on July 6th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/05/a-second-wave-of-stupidity/

The coronavirus panic was starting to ebb after the successful state reopenings of May and enthusiastic public protests of June. Rather than acknowledging this good news story, the same lunatics are clamoring to tighten the screws again.

First we were warned about an exponential increase. Cases were doubling and tripling in as many days. Soon millions would be sick and dying. Then we were warned of rising deaths, even though many of these deaths had other causes.

We were told to flatten the curve. We needed to stay home. We should not wear masks. Then we should wear masks.

The whole experience has been dizzying.

The Testing Solution

The media and experts then began selling tests as the key. Why exactly was unclear, with the vast majority of people having mild symptoms, no cure or vaccine in sight, and no realistic way for our decrepit public health system to do contact tracing. But tests it would be.

We now conduct a lot of tests. “Drive-by” testing has happened in some locales. Private companies, local walk-in clinics, and county health departments are all offering tests. So far, 36 million coronavirus tests have been administered.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

An Industry of Untruth The brand of all cultural revolutions is untruth about the past and present in order to control the future. Why we have this happening to our country is the only mystery left. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 6th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/05/an-industry-of-untruth/

The current revolution is based on a series of lies, misrepresentations, and distortions, whose weight will soon sink it.

Viral confusion

Unfortunately few in authority have been more wrong, and yet more self-righteously wrong, than the esteemed Dr. Anthony Fauci. Given his long service as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and his stature during the AIDS crisis, he has rightly been held up by the media as the gold standard of coronavirus information. The media has constructed Fauci as a constant corrective of Trump’s supposed “lies” about the utility of travel bans, analogies with a bad flu year, and logical endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a “what do you have to lose” possible therapy.

But the omnipresent Fauci himself unfortunately has now lost credibility. The reason is that he has offered authoritative advice about facts, which either were not known or could not have been known at the time of his declarations.

Since January, Fauci has variously advised the nation both that the coronavirus probably was unlikely to cause a major health crisis in the United States and later that it might yet kill 240,000 Americans. In January, he praised China for its transparent handling of the coronavirus epidemic, not much later he conceded that perhaps they’d done a poor job of that. He has cautioned that the virus both poses low risks and, later, high risks, for Americans. Wearing masks, Fauci warned, was both of little utility and yet, later, essential. Hydroxychloroquine, he huffed, had little utility; when studies showed that it did, he still has kept mostly silent.

At various times, he emphasized that social distancing and avoiding optional activities were mandatory, but earlier that blind dating and going on cruise ships were permissible. Fauci weighed in on the inadvisability of restarting businesses prematurely, but he has displayed less certainty hedged about the millions of demonstrators and rioters in the streets for a month violating quarantines. The point is not that he is human like all of us, but that in each of these cases he asserted such contradictions with near-divine certainty—and further confused the public in extremis.

HISTORY Comments turned off

The original black American patriots By Fritz Pettyjohn

Posted By on July 6th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/the_original_black_american_patriots.html

The American cause hung by a thread in the summer of 1781.  The British were entrenched in New York, and the main Continental Army commanded by George Washington was incapable of dislodging them.  In Virginia, a British Army of 7,000 men led by Lord Cornwallis wreaked havoc, opposed only by 900 Continentals under General Lafayette. Governor Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia Assembly had been chased from Richmond and Charlottesville.  Vital supplies to General Nathaniel Greene’s army in South Carolina were cut off.

Washington’s appeals to the states for reinforcements had gone unanswered, and when he decided to march south to confront Cornwallis, he had only 2,500 able-bodied men.  They were actually outnumbered by the accompanying French force of 3,000 soldiers.  It was a fateful decision.  Failure would almost certainly be fatal to the war for independence.

When they reached Virginia in September of 1781, Cornwallis was holed up at Yorktown.  His force had been decimated by malaria, the curse of all Europeans south of the Mason-Dixon line.  The rest of the history of the Battle of Yorktown is familiar to most literate Americans.  The British surrender effectively ended the War of Independence.  American sovereignty was born.

The small force of American soldiers who marched south with Washington 239 years ago had very few veterans left from the armies of 1775 to 1780.  These original Continentals had served their terms of enlistment and had returned to their farms and families.  Washington took anyone who would serve, and hundreds of free blacks joined the cause, eager for gainful employment.  Of the 2500-strong force who arrived with Washington at Yorktown, as many as 20% were free blacks.  They had an inherent genetic advantage over the Europeans.  Because their ancestors came from sub-Saharan Africa, they were naturally resistant to malaria, and were strong, healthy men, fully capable of discharging their duties.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Campus Culture Seizes the Streets Taxpayers, parents and donors need to save higher education from activists who claim to be scholars. By John M. Ellis

Posted By on July 6th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/campus-culture-seizes-the-streets-11593973851?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

How did radical ideas like abolishing or defunding the police move from the fringes to official policy seemingly overnight in cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles and New York? And after George Floyd’s killing by police touched off protests, why did so many prominent journalists and intellectuals rationalize looting and violence? For an answer, look to the nation’s politicized college campuses.

A well-known professional standard for college professors warns against “taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own.” That statement, from the American Association of University Professors, dates from 1915 but is still in force.

Most campuses have similar rules of their own. Yet across the country, these categorical prohibitions are now ignored. Academia has become politicized from top to bottom.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Trump at Mount Rushmore Progressives deride his defense of America’s founding principles. *****

Posted By on July 6th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-at-mount-rushmore-11593978913?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

At Mt. Rushmore, Trump uses Fourth of July celebration to stoke a culture war

—Los Angeles Times

Trump Uses Mount Rushmore Speech to Deliver Divisive Culture War Message

— New York Times

Trump pushes racial division, flouts virus rules at Rushmore

—Associated Press

At Mount Rushmore, Trump exploits social divisions, warns of ‘left-wing cultural revolution’ in dark speech ahead of Independence Day

—Washington Post

President Trump delivered one of the best speeches of his Presidency Friday evening at Mount Rushmore, and for evidence consider the echo-chamber headlines above. The chorus of independent media voices understands that Mr. Trump is trying to rally the country in defense of traditional American principles that are now under radical and unprecedented assault.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Do Never-Trump Republicans Know How Liberal Joe Biden Has Become?

Posted By on July 6th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/06/do-never-trump-republicans-know-how-liberal-joe-biden-has-become/

President Donald Trump causes people to do the strangest things, but none is as strange as the growing determination by some Republicans to get Joe Biden elected in November, even as Biden moves further and further leftward.

We aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed that, while the country is fixated on the coronavirus panic-demic and race riots, Biden’s agenda has shifted sharply to the socialist side of the spectrum.

FiveThirtyEight noted a few weeks ago that “The Pandemic Has Pushed Biden To The Left. How Far Will He Go?”

Around the same time, New York magazine reported that “Biden Is Planning an FDR-Size Presidency.”

One Democratic consultant told The Hill that Biden has moved to the left on issues such as bankruptcy policy and college affordability, and that a Biden win, along with Democrats regaining control of the Senate, “could lead to a New Deal era of progressive policies.”

MarketWatch recently said Biden is proposing a “radical tax plan” that “goes after the indolent rich.”

Then there is Biden’s joining up with Sen. Bernie Sanders to create “task forces” on various issues.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Left’s Soviet Insane Asylum for Non-Mask Wearers Progressives’ faithful devotion to socialist-style “psychiatric” disposal of political dissidents. Jamie Glazov

Posted By on July 6th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/lefts-soviet-insane-asylum-non-mask-wearers-jamie-glazov/

EXCERPT:

The former Soviet Union possessed many imaginative mechanisms to deal with the problem of enemies of the people who obstructed the path to socialist utopia – now known as “social justice.” One of those mechanisms was the practice of confining individuals who were thinking the wrong thoughts to insane asylums. Indeed, if you caused any trouble for the commissars, a good inoculation of neuroleptics (powerful drugs used to “quiet” the symptoms of schizophrenia), forcibly administered through a tube in the nose, could do wonders in bringing your politically incorrect behavior to a halt.

Dissidents such as Valeriya Novodvorskaya, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Pyotr Grigorenko, Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Esenin-Volpin and Joseph Brodsky were all among the brave freedom-fighters who bore the brunt of the Soviet practice of institutionalizing dissidents in mental hospitals and force-feeding them mind-shattering drugs. Novodvorskaya was confined in the prison psychiatric hospital in Kazan for her dissident activites – and she described her harrowing experience in this hospital in her collection of writings, Po Tu Storonu Otchayaniya (Beyond Despair). Gorbanevskaya was committed to a psychiatric hospital for attending the 1968 Red Square demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Grigorenko suffered the same fate for criticizing the Khrushchev regime. Bukovsky was confined to a psychiatric hospital for “anti-Soviet agitation.” Brodksy was sent to mental hospitals for not writing the right kind of poetry; his treatments involved “tranquilizing” injections, sleep deprivation and forced freezing baths. Esenin-Volpin was institutionalized in the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital for his anti-Soviet thoughts.

Today’s progressive Democrats are also faithfully journeying on an uplifting odyssey. Horrified by Trump’s opposition to Obama’s “fundamental transformations,” they have found their own neuroleptics in the form of the 25th Amendment and a bill seeking to impeach the president for being mentally unsound. Indeed, Trump has to be mentally deranged and unfit for office, because what other reason could possibly explain his frightening disagreement with the Left’s un-American creed of identity politics – race and gender uber alles? What other factor could possibly be at play in his embrace of individual freedom and responsibility – and in his rejection of group privileges and racial/gender hierarchies that, as David Horowitz has noted, can only be manifested after America’s Constitution is null and void?

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Battle for America’s Soul Biden is on the wrong side. Joseph Klein

Posted By on July 6th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/battle-americas-soul-joseph-klein/

Joe Biden has often said during his presidential campaign that we are in a “battle for America’s soul.” A nice soundbite, but Biden is already conceding this battle to globalists who disdain American sovereignty. Indeed, Biden is an extreme globalist himself. And Biden has for the most part been AWOL in the battle being waged for America’s soul over the founding ideals of our nation, which are under attack by the far-left progressive base of the Democratic Party. After weeks of silence, Biden finally spoke out on June 30th in favor of protecting the statues and monuments of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. But Biden’s political correctness prevents him from standing up strongly for American exceptionalism against the mobs in the streets and the mainstream media.

As we honor our nation’s independence on July 4th, we should reflect on the timeless words in the Declaration of Independence penned by Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Joe Biden garbled these words in one of his typical gaffes, declaring instead: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women are created, by the, you know, you know the thing.” However, even when Biden was more articulate in restating America’s founding ideals in his 2017 New York Times op-ed article, he (or his ghost writer) went off the rails by trying to characterize President Trump’s America First policies as antithetical to those ideals.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

BLM’s Violence & the Death of America’s Cities The corpses are already piling up. John Perazzo

Posted By on July 6th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/blms-violence-death-americas-cities-john-perazzo/

The police-hating rhetoric of the openly and proudly Marxist “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement is doing exactly what it did five years ago – creating a massive increase in violent crime and homicide throughout urban America. You may recall that back in 2015-16, BLM’s anti-police protests and riots – particularly in the aftermath of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri – intimidated officers nationwide into becoming much less proactive in dealing with criminal suspects. A Pew Research Center report titled “Behind the Badge” – which tabulated the results of a questionnaire that was sent to thousands of officers – confirmed that 85 to 95 percent of law-enforcement officers in large police departments became highly reluctant to engage criminals except where absolutely necessary.

The consequences of the new timidity of law-enforcement were monumental:
 

In 2015, America’s 56 largest cities experienced a 17% rise in homicides.
Twelve cities with large black populations saw their murder totals spike even more dramatically – e.g., by 54% in D.C., 60% in Newark, 72% in Milwaukee, 83% in Nashville, and 90% in Cleveland.
Robberies surged in America’s 81 largest cities during the 12 months that followed the shooting of Michael Brown.
During the first quarter of 2016, homicides in America’s 63 largest cities increased by 9%, while nonfatal shootings were up 21%.
 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Lies, Damn Lies and COVID-19 Statistics By Stacey Lennox

Posted By on July 6th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2020/07/03/lies-damn-lies-and-covid-19-statistics-n603433

As beaches are closed for the 4th of July and even Texas starts to roll back towards COVID-19 lockdown, it sure seems like the goalposts have shifted. The purpose of public health policy went from slow the spread, to flatten the curve, and now seems to stop the spread altogether. Dr. Scott Atlas, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, says the idea of preventing infection is not just unnecessary; it is irrational.

As much as Democrats and the media want to keep us locked down and scared, the current situation does not warrant any of this. According to Dr. Atlas, political leaders and policymakers need to take a much closer look at the data. He is quite optimistic about how state reopenings have progressed to date.

In an interview with Larry O’Connor, Dr. Atlas gives a detailed assessment of the data and provides a great perspective on what data we should use to hold leaders accountable. It isn’t rising case numbers. With more mingling and more testing, rising cases were inevitable.

O’Connor and Dr. Atlas got into a discussion about how misleading the case metric is. It merely means a positive test. In the context of COVID-19, where approximately half of the cases are asymptomatic, it is a meaningless statistic. Further, as testing has become proactive, or required in some cases, and more widely available, saying there is a new case doesn’t denote illness.